Internet Explorer 9 bested all rival browsers in the latest iteration of a social engineered malware test performed by NSS Labs.
With a block rate of over 99%, IE9 is in a comfortable lead compared to all competitors including Apple Safari 5, Google Chrome 12, Mozilla Firefox 4 and Opera 11, in terms of the protection it offers users against socially engineered malicious code.
“Windows Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) caught an exceptional 99.2% of live threats: 96% with the SmartScreen URL reputation and an additional 3.2% with Application Reputation. URL Reputation, which is included in IE8, and Application Reputation, which is new to IE9, are the two components that make up IE9’s SmartScreen Filter. IE9 with SmartScreen offers the best protection of any browser against socially engineered malware,” NSS Labs stated.
The test was performed in the second quarter of 2011, and this is why the versions of some of the browsers mentioned above are a tad older than what’s currently available on the market.
The NSS Labs study is focused entirely on the level of protection that browsers provide against socially engineered malware. No additional browser security technologies were taken into account, nor did vulnerabilities or extensions matter in any other way.
Socially engineered malware is extremely prevalent with users being four times more likely to come across this type of threat than attacks involving more traditional exploits, according to Bruce Hughes, AVG Technologies.
Such malicious code relies on socially engineered attacks to compromise computers, tracking victims into thinking they’re downloading screen savers, antivirus, video codec and other legitimate software, when they’re actually infecting their machines with malware.
According to NSS Labs, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera are extremely far from matching IE9 in terms of the protection offered against socially engineered threats.
“Google Chrome 12 caught 13.2% of the live threats, considerably more than the 3%observed during the Q3 2010 global test. This improvement tracks to an enhancement in SafeBrowsing so that, according to Google, “Chrome now warns you before downloading some types of malicious files”.
“Apple Safari 5 caught 7.6% of the live threats. Protection offered was near identical to that of Firefox. Mozilla Firefox 4 caught 7.6% of the live threats, far fewer than Internet Explorer 9. Results were 11.4% less than the 19% protection rate observed in our Q3 2010 global test, indicating an overall drop in protection for Firefox.
“Opera 11 caught 6.1% of the live threats, providing considerably less protection against socially-engineered malware than the other browsers tested,” NSS Labs noted.
In the past, representatives of browser vendors providing IE competitors disputed similar findings, however, so far not one of the competitors has provided results of a test contradicting NSS Labs’ studies.
Roger Capriotti, Director, Internet Explorer Product Marketing, stresses that the IE team is hard at work constantly improving the quality and protection of IE’s SmartScreen technology.
“Since the October 2010 NSS report, the average time taken by SmartScreen filter to block a threat has gotten 28% faster - and if Application Reputation is considered, then the average time has improved by 85%. Not only has the effectiveness of the technology improved, but so has the speed at which it is able to identify socially engineered malware. For our Windows customers, this means fewer infections and headaches for you,” he stated.
Internet Explorer 10 (IE10) Platform Preview 2 (PP2) Build 10.0.1008.16421 is available for download here.
Windows Internet Explorer 9 RTW for Windows 7 and Windows 7 SP1 is available for download here.
Firefox 6 for Windows is available for download here.
Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.
Opera 12.00 Codenamed Wahoo Pre-Alpha and Opera 11.50 for Windows are available for
download here.
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